• Introduction
• Nature and Development of Irish 
• Some Linguistic Properties
• Literature in Iish
• The use of Irish today
• Hiberno-English

Introduction

The Irish language is the national and first official language of Ireland, the other official language being English. Irish is one of the three 'Gaelic' languages, but referring to it as 'Gaelic', 'Gälisch','gaelique' etc. is generally considered derogatory, or designed to emphasise its peripheral role in present-day Ireland, by Irish speakers. Irish has been spoken in Ireland for over 2,500 years, and is the language from which most Irish placenames and surnames derive:

Dublin < Dubh-linn, meaning 'black pool' (the city's name in modern Irish is Baile Átha Cliath, 'the town of the ford of the hurdles');
Belfast < Béal Feirste, ' sea-inlet of the sandbanks';
Derry < Doire Cholm Cille, 'the oak-grove of St. Colm Cille;
Kennedy < Ó Cinnéide, 'ugly head'; or
MacDonald < Mac Dónaill, 'son of Dónall', etc..

Irish is the ancestral language of the 70-million-strong Irish diaspora, and of most Scots, throughout the world.

As regards Northern Ireland, the parties to the Belfast Agreement of 10 April 1998 agreed that the British Government will 'take resolute action to promote the language', both through recognising its status and providing financial assistance, in areas ranging from television and film to Irish-medium education. It became an official working language of the European Union on the 1st January 2007.  The Treaty of Amsterdam gave the right to Irish speakers to write to the EU institutions in Irish and to receive a reply in that language.

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Nature and Development of Irish

Irish and its offshoots, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, constitute the Gaelic or Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages. Welsh, Cornish and Breton and the now extinct Gaulish (the language spoken in France, then called Gaul, before the country was invaded by Caesar's Roman legions) form the Brythonic or Brittonic group, and all Celtic languages form part of the Indo-European family of languages. Related Celtic languages were spoken by the Galatians in Anatolia (modern Turkey) to whom St. Paul wrote his letters; and in the Polish Galicja and Spanish Galicia, giving some idea of the vast area peopled by the Celts in the pre-Christian era.

Our earliest evidence for Irish is to be found in ogham inscriptions (a system of writing used mainly on stone or wood, based on vertical and slanted strokes corresponding to the Latin letters, and in the words of Professor David Greene dating from 'a time not much before the fourth century A.D.'. The language is usually divided into the following periods: Old Irish AD c. 650-900, Middle Irish c. 900-c.1200, Early Modern Irish c. 1200 - c. 1600, Late Modern Irish c. 1600 -.

From the Old Irish period until the 13th century the language underwent a prolonged period of regularization and simplification. Although they had existed in the language since earliest times, dialects do not come into view to any degree until the 17th century. This is because the literary standard language was common to the entire Gaelic-speaking area, which for over a thousand years consisted of all of Ireland, most of Scotland, and the Isle of Man. Irish migration to northern Britain had begun even before the Roman withdrawal in 410 A.D., but the process of Irish expansion gathered momentum after the establishment of the kingdom of Dál Riata around 500 A.D. In 843 A.D. Cineadh Mac Ailpin, king of the Irish-speaking people in northern Britain, gained accession to the kingship of the Picts, effectively becoming king of what we now call Scotland. Indeed the medieval Latin word 'Scotus' meant simply an Irish speaker, as evidenced by the name of the 9th century philosopher at the court of Charles the Bald, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (Latin 'born in Ireland').

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Some Linguistic Properties of Irish, Compared with Other Languages

Irish and indeed the Celtic languages in general are very unlike other European languages in syntax and idiom. Irish lacks any single words for 'yes' or 'no', the question being repeated instead. Thus the answer to 'Did you see him'? is either Chonaic ('I saw') or Ní fhaca ('I did not see'). Irish does not emphasize by use of intonation, as in English, but by bringing the item to be emphasized to the head of its clause after the copula (one of the verbs 'to be): 'I don't live in Belfast any more' is rendered Ní i mBéal Feirste atá cónaí orm a thuilleadh (lit. 'It is not in Belfast that dwelling is on-me any more'). Similarly 'Do you want a stamp'? is An stampa atá uait?, literally 'Is it a stamp that is from-you'? Irish is a noun-centred language where English tends to be verb-centred: 'she slept' is expressed in Irish by bhí sí ina codladh, 'she was in her sleeping'; 'I am very hungry' is tá ocras mór orm , 'there is a great hunger on me'; 'you owe me a pound' is tá punt agat orm, 'there is a pound at you on me' or 'you have a pound on me'.

The distinction in Polish between ona jest and ona bywa ('she is' and 'she habitually is' or 'she is in the habit of being'), i.e. between the present and present habitual tenses, corresponds exactly to the Irish tá sí and bíonn sí. This distinction is not found verbally in English, French, German, Spanish or Italian, but is present in other Celtic languages such as Welsh, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, and in other Slavic languages. There are effectively 3 forms of the verb 'to be', for example:

I am Irish: Is Gael mé.
I am tired: Tá tuirse orm (lit. 'is tiredness on me')
I am here every day: Bím anseo gach lá.

The is/tá distinction corresponds almost exactly to the difference between the Spanish verbs ser/estar.

Both Slavic languages and Irish have a fondness for palatalisation: the palatal quality of the consonant 'n' in the Polish word nie corresponds to the 'n' of the Irish word níl, 'there is not', and the palatalised initial consonant of the Russian d'ec-yat' (ten) is the same as the initial consonant of the Irish deich. Irish has no verb 'to have', and Russian avoids the use of this verb, e.g.

English: I have a book.
Irish: Tá leabhar agam, lit. 'is book with-me'
Russian: U m'enyá knyíga. 'with me book'.

In addition, the Russian equivalents for the words 'push' and 'pull' on doors are exact equivalents, both avoid the use of verbs, viz.

Irish: push= 'uait', lit. 'from you'; pull='chugat', lit. 'to you'.
Russian: push= 'at cyibyá', lit. 'from you'; pull= 'kcyi-byé', lit. 'to you'.

Finally a number of verbal endings, such as the first person singular, present tense, and the second person singular, past tense, are pronounced similarly in both Irish and Polish:

Polish: jestem (I am now) bywam (I am usually) bylas' (you were)

Irish: táim (I am now) bím (I am usually) bhís (you were)

Irish, like Greek, Hebrew, and Esperanto, has only one article, the definite, singular an and plural na. Initial mutations in Irish are quite complex and the following is merely one example to illustrate the phenomenon. The singular article changes the initial consonant of feminine nouns: bean, pronounced /ban/, 'a woman', an bhean, pronounced /on van/, the woman'; it prefixes a 't' to masculine nouns beginning with a vowel: asal, 'donkey', an t-asal. The changes which occur at the beginning of Irish words are as complex as Polish 'koncówki'!

A further feature which distinguishes Irish and the other Celtic languages from all other Indo-European languages (although it is a feature shared with Arabic and Hebrew) is the existence of what are called prepositional pronouns. Prepositions combine with personal pronouns, e.g. ar, 'on' + mé = orm, 'on me'; le, 'with' + sí, 'she' = léi, 'with her'; ó, 'from' + sé, 'he' = uaidh, 'from him'.

Although Irish was not much cultivated during the 19th century, its status as an official language since 1922 has helped to modernize it. All writers now employ the Caighdeán Oifigiúil or Official Standard, a regularized spelling and grammar developed by the translation staff or the Oireachtas, the Irish Parliament. The terminological committees of the Department of Education have over the years provided speakers of Irish with technical vocabulary in a wide range of subjects. The Gaeltacht radio service, Raidió na Gaeltachta, and since 1996 the Irish language television service TG4, have disseminated much modern terminology as well as familiarizing native speakers with dialects other than their own.

The first decision of the first government of the Irish Free State in 1922 was that all elementary and second-level schools should teach Irish to all pupils for at least one hour per day. Additionally all work for the first two years of primary school was to be in Irish only. The number of individuals and families who speak Irish, particularly in Dublin and Belfast, is slowly but constantly growing.

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Literature in Irish

The Irish language produced the oldest written literature north of the Alps, and has an unbroken literary tradition of over 14 centuries: the oldest text which can be dated with certainty, the Amra Choluim Cille, the life of St. Colm Cille, was written in 597 A.D. Ireland thus has the oldest vernacular literature in western Europe. The earliest writings in Irish, consisting of glosses or explanations of the Latin gospels, and sometimes amusing poems written in their margins, may be seen at the University Library in Würzburg, Germany.

The present state of Irish literature is anomalous since the reading public for Irish is small, but the output in both verse and prose is relatively large (around 130 new titles appear each year). The contemporary literature is varied in content and much of it compares favourably with writing in English in Ireland. The 12-volume French language 'Patrimoine littéraire européen' (Europe's Literary Heritage), edited in 1992 by Prof. Jean-Claude Polet of l'Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, an anthology of European literature from the Atlantic to the Urals and from the beginning of written literature to the 20th Century, devotes 4.89% of its content to literature in the Irish language.

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The use of Irish Today

The first decision of the first government of the Irish Free State in 1922 was that each primary and secondary school should teach Irish for at least one hour per day to all pupils. In addition, all of the work of the first two years at primary schools was to be conducted in Irish. Today the number of habitual Irish speakers is a small fraction of the total population, and in its Gaeltacht heartland is under unremitting pressure from English.

Yet, as Prof. Joe Lee wrote, 'the seemingly inevitable victory of the big battalions continues to be postponed', for centuries, one might add. Asked if the Irish language was dying, the greatest Irish language prose writer in the 20th Century, the late Máirtín Ó Cadhain replied: 'Yes, it has been dying for over 400 years.' An important factor in maintaining Irish as the everyday language of the Gaeltacht is the negative influence of incoming English-speaking families. Recent planning law has shown an increasing awareness by the State of its responsibility for the linguistic as well as the physical environment, and the need to protect the Gaeltacht from the uncontrolled influx of English-speakers. Through the Gaeltacht, or English-speaking part of the country, both the prestige of Irish, and the number who habitually speak it, particularly in Dublin and Belfast, continues to grow.

Since the achievement of independent Irish statehood the State has made various provisions for the maintenance and promotion of the language. Efforts to revive the language as the first spoken language were not successful. They faced the difficulties that by the time independence was achieved Irish was very much a minority language, nearly all of the speakers of which were competent in English, and that the Gaeltacht areas in which it was still spoken as the preferred community language (mainly on the western seaboard) were quite small. However, all surveys show that a large majority of the population today values the Irish language as Ireland's only national language and as an important part of the national heritage.

In a national sample survey conducted by the Linguistics Institute of Ireland in 1993, 9% said that they had used Irish in a conversation in the past week; 13% spoke Irish at home at least occasionally, while 71% never did; 5% spoke Irish at work (2% at least weekly and 3% less than weekly; 12% watched programmes in Irish on TV daily or a few times weekly while 28% watched them less often and 60% never watched TV programmes in Irish. Some 15% listened to Raidió na Gaeltachta (4% daily or a few times weekly and 11% less often); 15% listened to other radio programmes in Irish; 16% read Irish language columns in daily newspapers (5% daily or a few times weekly and 11% less often); 7% read books in Irish (1% daily or a few times weekly and 6% less often).

The 2002 Census showed 1.54 million people, or 43%, claiming a knowledge of Irish, but only 73,000, or 2.6% of the population (apart from schoolchildren who use it in school), speaking it daily. A hopeful sign is that among pre-school children, aged 3-4, i.e. those not yet attending school, the percentage speaking Irish daily is 5.4%. It is very significant that among children aged 3-4, the percentage speaking Irish daily increased from 4.6% in 1996 to 5.4% in 2002.

The Official Languages Act, 2003 guarantees the right of all Irish citizens to communicate with the State in either Irish or English, and provides mechanisms to ensure that this right is respected by public officials. It also provided for the simultaneous publication of important official documents such as annual reports or policy statement in both languages. A new development is provision for a complaints mechanism for citizens who believe their right to use Irish has been ignored, and penalties for state and semi-state bodies and individual officials who are found not to have shown due respect for the national language.

There are 235 primary schools and 37 secondary schools in Ireland which teach the national curriculum through Irish only. The primary schools are attended by around 29,000 pupils and the secondary schools are attended by around 9,000 pupils. In Northern Ireland around 2,500 pupils receive their education through Irish in 2 secondary schools, 18 primary schools and 39 pre-schools.

According to Nielsen, the organisation which researches television viewership in Ireland, the Irish language television service TG4 has a reach of over 800,000 viewers on average each night and a share of over 3.5% of television viewers during peak viewing hours. Raidió na Gaeltachta broadcasts nationally from Gaeltacht areas, and Raidió na Life is Dublin's Irish language radio service.

Some 130 new titles annually, 1 daily newspaper (published in Belfast, Northern Ireland!), one weekly newspaper and a number of monthly magazines are published in Irish, and Irish language columns appear regularly in the English-language press.

Further information about the Irish language today can be found on the websites of the Irish language promotion body Foras na Gaeilge and the Irish language television station TG4.

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Hiberno-English

The influence of Irish on Hiberno-English, the English spoken in Ireland, is considerable, whether we are dealing with pronunciation, syntax or morphology. Hiberno-English tends to have pure vowel sounds, as in Irish, Polish and most Continental languages, making it easier to pronounce, and clearer, for foreign learners of English. It avoids the diphthongisation of RP English. For example, the three words 'cap, cup, carp'are pronounced quite distinctly in Hiberno-English, whereas to the Continental ear they tend to sound the same in the RP (Received Pronunciation) which is the prestige variety of spoken English in England (used by about 2 % of the population of England, according to Professor David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language).

In syntax the more flexible Irish word order is reflected in Hiberno-English in such phrases as 'is it to Cork you are going tomorrow?' or 'is it tomorrow you are going to Cork?', depending on the element it is desired to stress. Standard English tends to have a more rigid word order, using only voice inflection to stress particular elements of a sentence. Incidentally, the Irish, or more generally Celtic, flexibility in word order is reflected in French 'C'est demain que tu vas à Cork?', and it is now increasingly recognised that French word order has been far more influenced by its Gaulish predecessor than had hitherto been supposed.

The range of verbal possibilities in Hiberno-English is also increased by its adoption of non-standard patterns, deriving from Irish, in its verbal system (e.g. 'I do be', to compensate for the absence of a habitual present tense in English (see below) or 'I was after getting married', influenced by the Irish bhíos tar éis pósadh, 'I was after marrying'.

Many Irish idioms survive in Hiberno-English: 'Tis true for you' (is fíor duit); 'Not a bother on me' (ní gearánta dom), 'he was putting in on me' (bhí sé ag cur isteach orm) for 'he was interfering with me'; 'he's very near himself' (gar dó féin) for 'he's very selfish'; 'who is the bike with?' (cé leis an rothar?) for 'who owns the bike?', 'is it yourself that's in it?' (an tú féin atá ann?) for 'is it you?', etc.

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